TaskAngel for Windows syncs directly with Toodledo

My company MyPocketSoft has just released TaskAngel, a personal workload organizer for Windows. This provides all the richness and immediacy of a desktop app, while using Toodledo as a sync server. This provides a number of benefits:

Backup: Toodledo acts as a secure backup server. If you lose your local copy of your task list, you can get it back from the server with one click.

On the go: Hand-held devices such as the iPhone and Windows Mobile have the ability to sync to Toodledo, so you can easy feed changes back and forth between them and TaskAngel. And you can run TaskAngel on your laptop while traveling, when the Internet is unavailable.

Work and play: You can keep your one copy of your task list on your work PC, and another at home. TaskAngel sync keeps them up to date with each other.

To sync with Windows Mobile, you use PocketInformant or any other app that syncs the device with with Toodledo. And sync TaskAngel with Toodledo as well. So Toodledo becomes the trusted third party, keeping everyone in step.

My company MyPocketSoft has just released TaskAngel, a personal workload organizer for Windows. This provides all the richness and immediacy of a desktop app, while using Toodledo as a sync server. This provides a number of benefits:

Backup: Toodledo acts as a secure backup server. If you lose your local copy of your task list, you can get it back from the server with one click.

On the go: Hand-held devices such as the iPhone and Windows Mobile have the ability to sync to Toodledo, so you can easy feed changes back and forth between them and TaskAngel. And you can run TaskAngel on your laptop while traveling, when the Internet is unavailable.

Work and play: You can keep your one copy of your task list on your work PC, and another at home. TaskAngel sync keeps them up to date with each other.

I very much would like a desktop app that sync's to toodledo so I downloaded and tried this application. Your website doesn't appear to have a forum to discuss it so I'll do it here.

I have some comments about the install process first off:

Why did you choose to use .NET 4 when it's still in beta. This was almost a deal breaker for me: I was reluctant to install beta software on my nice new Windows 7 machine. I ultimately did decide to install it but it makes me nervous.

As suggested in the help file I set up my sync to toodledo and had it do the sync. What the help file didn't say was that all the pre-canned stuff already in TaskAngel would be added to my toodledo set up. I would have preferred to be offered a choice to replace the TaskAngel set up with my own carefully crafted folders and contexts.

Please don't create an icon on my desktop without asking me. I very much dislike desktop icons. That is soooo Windows XP. ;)

Please have an option to remove the TaskAngel icon / show completed checkbox / search items from the task bar so I can see more of MY items. Having those in a toolbar / menu item would be enough.

The app itself looks slick and I'm looking forward to spending some time with it over the next little while to try it out.

I've been tinkering with TaskAngel for about 20 minutes now and have noticed two troubling things:

I'm seeing numerous duplicate tasks in the list after adding a couple of tasks, starring a couple more and generally just clicking around. Fortunately it appears to just be a display issue because sync'ing back to toodledo does not create duplicates on the website.

The application is using a huge amount of memory for what it's doing. On launch it was using 37MB, after 20 minutes it was using 46MB. I only have about 50 or 60 active tasks so this seems quite excessive.

Andrew - I just discovered TaskAngel and I'm very impressed with it! As someone who LOVES the functionality of Toodledo, and loves the Toodledo iPhone app, but finds the web UI a bit, um, awkward - I'm so glad to see a dedicated Windows client.

I have a few visual/UI nitpicks, but I'll wait to see what it looks like after a few updates before dwelling on the negative. Again, nice work!

Hi Jeff, thanks for your comments. I'm glad you like it. We're relying on customer feedback - positive and negative - to help us shape TaskAngel into a great product.

Hi Peter, thanks for the question - I'll put something onto the Web to give a definitive picture of how TA matches against Toodledo's features. In this first release we haven't tried to do everything. Here is a quick summary of the major things in Toodledo that are not supported by TA right now:

Sorry it's rather a long list! I wonder if this forum could help set the right priorities. All, please let me know what are the most important things that you need, and also add to the above list if I've missed off something important to you.

Hi Adam,
I'm sorry to hear TaskAngel is not working for you on Windows 7. That's disappointing, as it should work fine. Please would you send me an email with details of the problem you are seeing?

Hi Peter,
Thanks for your steer on priorities. We will use these to help set the enhancement priorities for TaskAngel development. The invitation still stands for everyone on this forum to give me any other views if they are different from Peter's top three.

We have just released TaskAngel 1.1. This has a number of improvements:

The price has been reduced from $29.95 to $19.95

The Filter Panel has been redesigned. Now it makes better use of space, it has icons to illustrate the major filter categories, and you can adjust its width. And the context menus let you expand or collapse all items.

There is now a Note Panel below the Task List. It replaces the popup notes that were used in the previous version.

The Task List has three additional columns - Added Date, Modified Date and Completed Date. You can sort on these columns. This makes it easy to find your most recently added tasks, for example.

Print Preview has been added, and the Page Setup dialog has been redesigned.

Sort marks have been added to the Task List columns, so it is easier to see how your tasks have been sorted.

A Font button has been added to the toolbar, to make it easier to adjust the screen font.

TaskAngel now uses .NET Framework version 2.0 instead of version 4.0, and no download is required. This makes TaskAngel installation much faster.

More Windows versions are supported.

TaskAngel now occupies less memory.

There is improved resilience to the loss of your Internet connection while syncing with Toodledo.

The 'top three' enhancements asked for in this forum - Subtasks, Goals and Reminders - aren't included in this version, but they are under development.